Heartland
by xahra99
Summary: It's the summer of '69, and everything is not quite what it seems. Mitchell and Josie in the sixties.


Heartland

A Being Human fan fiction by xahra99

It was 1969. The Beatles topped the charts with _'The Ballad of John and Yoko_,' while soldiers died in Vietnam. It was a long hot summer in Bristol. Josie and Mitchell hung out in his flat with the windows wide open. They played _Yellow Submarine_ on repeat while the scent of fried fish drifted up the stairs from the chippy on the ground floor. The album belonged to Josie. Mitchell would have preferred the Kinks or Small Faces, but he kept that to himself. It was the happiest time of his life.

Josie flapped one arm feebly. "Pass me that water," she said.

Mitchell handed her a chipped glass. The pint mug had come with the house when Mitchell moved in six months ago. It was thumb-printed and cracked but Josie didn't seem to mind. She drank half the water and flopped back on the sheets, offering the cup to Mitchell. He lit a cigarette instead. "Want one?"

Josie shook her head. A thin sheen of sweat covered her forehead. "Too hot..." she groaned."Maybe later."

Mitchell shrugged as he tapped ash into a saucer. There was no thermometer in the flat but he knew it must be hot because Josie never normally turned down a drink or a cigarette. The heat wave had lasted for days. Mitchell couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Vampires had a much lower body temperature than humans. It was one of the things people knew about vampires.

The _other_ thing people knew about vampires was that they had a thirst for human blood, but Mitchell had been on the wagon for eight days and (he glanced at his watch)...three hours, forty five minutes and a handful of seconds. He was finding it easier than he had expected, but that might have been the sex.

He inhaled and ashed his cigarette again.

Josie reached up, grabbed Mitchell's cigarette and took a long drag before handing the stub back to him. Her fingers lingered on his arm. "You're freezing!" she protested. "I don't believe you. You're actually cold."

Mitchell swept his gaze over the clothing dotted around the floor. It was the most cleaning the floor had seen in days. "I can put a jumper on," he said.

"Nah." Josie said sleepily. "It's nice. Like having air conditioning." She curled closer to Mitchell.

"We'll get a fan." Mitchell said. He stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer and threw an arm around Josie. In the background, John Lennon sang that all you needed was love. Mitchell hated the Beatles, but he thought that Lennon's bed-in was the best idea the musician had ever had. Josie and Mitchell had recreated John and Yoko's famous weekend extremely faithfully, but there was always room for improvement.

"No. I like it." Josie said. Her eyelids fluttered as she slid towards sleep. The thick black eyeliner on her lids dragged her eyes completely shut as she took a deep breath. She was naked apart from her earrings and lots of heavy rings. She had wonderful tits. Mitchell approved of wonderful tits. In his experience truly wonderful tits were few and far between.

He wondered how long he could keep their relationship going as he watched her doze off. Josie acted like she'd seen everything before even though she was a quarter of Mitchell's age. Oh, _technically_ she was twenty one and Mitchell was twenty five, but he'd been twenty five for a long time. The difference was that Mitchell was immortal and Josie just thought she was.

Herrick had told Mitchell not to tell anyone about the vampires, but Herrick had been wrong about a lot of things lately. He'd been wrong when he said that Mitchell wouldn't leave the other vampires, and he'd been wrong when he said that they would find Mitchell if he did. Fifty years of secrecy had made Mitchell very good at blending in.

Mitchell had never left before, but he'd never wanted to. He'd immersed himself so deeply in the vampire world after the Second World War that it had taken him over twenty years just to surface. Josie was a breath of fresh air compared to Herrick's propaganda.

Mitchell tickled Josie's arm. She smiled and raised her head. One hand reached up to rub her eyes, but her fingers stopped an inch away from her makeup.

Mitchell rolled over. "What would you say if I told you something I've never told to anybody else?" he asked.

"I'd say you were lying." Josie said bluntly. Mitchell raised his eyebrows and she elaborated. "That's the sort of thing guys say to a girl to get her into bed."

"You're already in bed." Mitchell pointed out.

Josie looked down at herself. "You're right. Seriously? You want to tell me something secret?"

Mitchell nodded.

"Then I need a cigarette."

Mitchell tossed her the pack. Josie rummaged under the bed for her lighter while Mitchell watched. He knew better than to offer her his Bic. Josie preferred to do things for herself. She withdrew a cheap plastic lighter studded with beads and sequins that had probably cost more than the original item in the first place, lit up and smiled luxuriously. "This secret. Is it a good thing?"

"Not really." Mitchell said.

"How bad are we talking, here?"

Mitchell hesitated. "I dunno. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing."

"You're not gay, are you?" Josie's eyes narrowed.

Mitchell looked at her incredulously. "If I was gay," he asked, "d' you think I'd be right here?"

"I don't know. I've known some pretty weird guys, all right." Josie said. She took another drag on her cigarette.

"I'm not gay." Mitchell said hastily.

Josie shrugged. "So what's so bad? Why're you so worried? Are you in trouble with the law? 'Cause that's okay. We can find a lawyer. I know people..."

_I know some too_, Mitchell thought.

"You're in with the mafia." Josie guessed. "You're a tax evader. A communist. A spy?"

"In _Bristol_?"

Josie shrugged. "There's got to be some spies outside of London."

Mitchell considered his options. He knew he could say_ I'm a vampire_ in such a deadpan voice that it negated any chance of the sentence actually being taken seriously. But Josie wouldn't believe him, and Mitchell wanted her to know the truth.

_Or maybe_, he thought as he looked around the scruffy flat, _I don't_. _I could ruin everything._

But Mitchell was lonely.

He opened his mouth.

There was a loud knock at the door. Mitchell hesitated. He glanced around as the knock repeated itself. The glass panel in the front door rattled in its frame as the noise settled into a rhythm; one that said that the knocker knew that people were in there and they could keep it up for as long as it took either of them to answer the door. After a couple of minutes Josie frowned and stubbed her cigarette out. "Look," she said as she struggled into her dress. "I'll get the door. You sit here and tell me what you've got to say when I get back."

Mitchell waited until she had left the room before he got up himself. It seemed wrong to confess to a revelation of such magnitude while wearing only underpants. He climbed from the bed and hunted for his trousers in the crumpled clothing on the floor, wondering how to tell Josie. As he turned the radio down and _'All You Need Is Love'_ faded into the void he heard Josie shout "Mitchell! Your friends are here!"

_I haven't got any friends_. Mitchell thought absently. _Just Josie._

_Shit_.

Mitchell yanked the bedroom door open. His bare feet skidded on the shag carpet. "Don't!" he shouted as Josie whirled around wide-eyed. "Don't invite them in!"

"We don't need to come in." somebody hissed from outside the door. Mitchell didn't recognize the voice but he filed it away in his memory anyway.

"Mitchell, what-" Josie demanded, but she was cut off in mid-sentence as the vampires pushed a half-naked and half-dead woman through the doorway and stepped back outside. Mitchell recognized a few. Seth. Jones. Cabot. They were dressed in black suits and hats, their eyes jet-black to match.

"Have fun," said Seth, and he slammed the door closed.

"Are you crazy?" Josie shouted. Somebody giggled nastily from outside. Josie didn't waste any more time on insults. She sank to her knees beside the woman, moaning "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God." Mitchell saw dark shapes through the glass door, their collars turned up against the midday sun.

The vampires hadn't gone. They were waiting.

"Mitchell!" Josie choked. "Do something!"

The girl sprawled in Josie's lap. She bled from a dozen bites. As far as Mitchell could see, none of them were fatal. Her skin was white as wax from shock and streaked with blood. Blood dappled Josie's hands and arms and spattered across the woodchip wallpaper. Mitchell closed his eyes to block the blood out but the thick red scent coiled into the air like a snake and twisted around him hard. Eight days, three hours and forty-five minutes suddenly seemed like a long time. Images skated in the darkness behind Mitchell's closed eyelids. They were not pleasant.

He heard the scuff of a footstep from outside. "It's for the best, Mitchell."

Mitchell choked. "Go away!"

Seth laughed mockingly. "We'll be here when you're done, Mitchell."

"We've missed you."

"Save some for later, won't you?"

"Christ, Mitchell!" Josie said sharply. She balled up the hem of her skirt to clean the girl's face. Mascara mixed with blood and tears on the pale skin. Josie reached out and wiped a streak of makeup from the girl's cheek with a maternal tenderness."Who the hell were they?"

"Vampires." Mitchell said absently.

Josie's head snapped up. She stared at Mitchell with panic in her eyes. Mitchell realized that she hadn't expected an answer. At least, not that one.

"Of course. Vampires." Josie said. Mitchell watched her think it over. And then she stored the new information at the back of her mind while she got on with the much more important task of caring for the injured girl. Later, Mitchell knew, she'd freak out. He hesitated, frozen.

"Mitchell," Josie said impatiently, "why are you just standing there? She's bleeding. Call an ambulance."

Mitchell gritted his teeth so hard that his jaw ached, resisting the pressure of lengthening canines. Sweat prickled coldly on his skin. He closed his eyes and opened them again.

The improvised rag dropped from Josie's hand.

"Christ!" she said, very fast. "You're one of them."

Mitchell blinked. When he opened his eyes, they were normal. "I am, okay, I am but it's not like that," he said through a locked jaw.

"They said they were your friends!'

"They're not. Trust me."

"I'm finding that a little hard right now." Josie said grimly. "Mitchell, I think she's dead."

Mitchell glanced down at the girl. "No. She's just passed out. She's still alive."

"How do you know? You haven't touched her!"

"I can hear her."

The shadows outside the patterned glass of the door were very still.

"Was this what you wanted to tell me?"

Mitchell nodded wordlessly. His gaze was drawn back to the blood that soaked Josie's dress. He could hear her heart racing with each beat. Her breath came fast, panicked. "I'll phone for help," she said, while Mitchell thought how good it would feel to sink his teeth into her throat. He'd already picked the spot; a cluster of freckles between the curve of her collarbone and the base of her ear. Nobody would see the marks, but he'd know they were there. He wrenched his gaze away. "Don't leave me alone with her!"

"Mitchell, I've got to get help!"

"I'm one second away from ripping your fucking throat out." Mitchell told her. "_Both_ your throats. You're going to have to do this on your own."

"Oh." Josie said. She swallowed and tucked her hair behind her ear, leaving a long red streak on her face. Her jaw set and she looked up at him. "Go."

"Where?" Mitchell asked. A part of him, not all that well hidden, hoped Josie would keep talking. Distract her. He could have her before she'd even noticed he had moved. His hands shook and he buried them deep in the pockets of his jeans. "I can't-" He couldn't get the words out.

Josie looked around wildly. Mitchell recognized her expression. She was trying to cope but she was fucking scared and it showed. She pointed at the bathroom. "In there. I'll lock the door."

"It's not fucking strong enough!"

"I trust you." Josie said simply.

Mitchell looked Josie's wide eyes and the gasping girl and the blood soaking into the shag carpet and he caught the bathroom door handle like it was a life-preserver. He slammed the door behind him. It was an old-fashioned door with a heavy brass lock. Mitchell heard the key twist behind him as Josie locked the door and wrenched the key out.

"Don't let me out," he gasped. "Not until it's done."

"I'm calling an ambulance right now!"

Mitchell sank to the floor. He leant his back against the door just in case Josie tried to open it to check how he was doing. He raised his right wrist to his mouth and tore at the skin until blood flowed, hoping to assuage the hunger. The blood was methadone rather than heroin. It did no good, but Mitchell drank it anyway.

It was a long time before Mitchell could think again. The first thing he heard was a siren and then men coming up the stairs outside. Heavy boots tramped inside and he heard exclamations as the saw the girl. Josie was everywhere; assisting, explaining and evading.

Somebody rapped at the door. "Is there someone in there?"

"My boyfriend." Josie said. 'He's not good with blood."

Mitchell heard the key turn in the lock. Josie pushed open the door and stood looking down at him. She'd changed her dress and although she still smelt of blood, the hunger was manageable. The world outside was a blur of white coats and dark jackets. The girl had already disappeared from the hall.

"It's all right," said Josie, in response to Mitchell's unanswered question. "They took her. They said-they said they think she's going to be okay." She knelt down and laid a hand on his arm. "Feeling better?"

Mitchell nodded, and then the circus took over.

The ambulance men checked both of them over and left it at that. They'd taken the girl to hospital, they said, and they'd contact her next of kin. The police were more persistent, but Josie was female and so obviously on the side of the angels anyway and Mitchell didn't have a drop of the girl's blood on him, they just took a statement and warned Mitchell not to move out in case they wanted to ask more questions.

Josie and Mitchell left the station at four in the morning. It was cooler, and Mitchell was grateful for the dark and the silence. Neither of them wanted to go back to the flat, so they ended up in an all-night cafe. Josie ordered a full English breakfast. Mitchell had coffee. He didn't feel like eating. Or maybe he felt too much like eating.

Josie gestured with a fork at Mitchell's lonely cup of coffee. "What's with the food?" she asked, "You do eat. I've seen you eat."

Mitchell nodded. "Don't feel like it just now."

Josie leant over the table with a conspiratorial grimace that would have had all the other customers in the cafe, if there had been any other customers, craning to listen."But you _do_ suck blood?"

"No. Not lately. It's complicated."

"You don't have to?"

"Not strictly. But it's hard not to."

"So who were those guys?"

"Vampires. My ...colleagues."

"You're not with them anymore." It was a statement, not a question. Josie was like that.

Mitchell shook his head.

"They wanted you back."

Mitchell nodded. He felt much more comfortable with nonverbal conversation. It was easier. Right now, he needed easy.

"Are they all like that?"

"Not all of them. Not all the time." Mitchell thought of Herrick. "Sounds like Seth's idea. He's not exactly subtle. There's another...Herrick, his name is. He's out of town at the moment. Thank God."

"Christ, Mitchell." Josie bit into a slice of toast. "Where did all this get so complicated?"

"I shouldn't have told you." Mitchell said morosely.

"You didn't." Josie pointed out. "They did. Actually, it was more of a demonstration, but same thing."

"I was going to."

"Stop being so fucking depressing."

"You don't know what I've done."

"And that's exactly what I mean!" Josie said. "You did the right thing, Mitchell."

"I didn't want to."

"But you still did."

They sat silently for a moment.

"What's going to happen to the flat?" Josie said practically.

"I'll phone a cleaning service. Send them round. Call the landlord. Cancel the lease." He thought of adding _don't you think I've had to deal with all this before_? but didn't.

"You're leaving?"

"You saw what they did. It's not safe to stay."

"I'm coming with you, then."

"Josie...."

"Do you think I can't handle this? I won't tell anyone else, but I'm involved, Mitchell, like it or not. And it's my choice."

Mitchell sighed. "You don't know who you're dealing with, Josie. You can turn around and walk away, right now. Nobody has to know."

"_I'll_ know." Josie said. "And there must be so much more I need to know about. I mean, does somebody have to turn you into a vampire? Does it hurt? And what about garlic? The thing about the mirrors must be true, 'cause even blokes normally have one. And you don't. I've noticed."

Mitchell sighed. "I've eaten garlic loads of times."

Josie narrowed her eyes. "How old are you, anyway?"

"I'm not going to talk about that here!"

"So you _will_ talk about it?"

"If we survive. Look, the only way this'll work is if the vampires get off our backs."

"How?" Josie squirted ketchup onto her fried egg. Mitchell looked away from the sticky red sauce.

"I could go to them," he said. "Try to explain"

"They'd let you?" Josie asked skeptically. "They'd listen?"

Mitchell shrugged. "Don't know. Depends how I say it, I guess. It's worth a try."

It took him three days to find Cabot. Mitchell had chosen the vampire for a reason. Several reasons, in fact. He was weak enough for Mitchell to beat him and stupid enough to think he could win. And he always stuck to the same hunting grounds, so he was easy to find. Mitchell just had to wait.

But vampires didn't feed all that often, and it was three days later when Mitchell tracked Cabot down by the docks. It was gone eleven and the pubs had just closed-a perfect time for predators of all kinds. Mitchell saw Cabot approach from the shadow of the crane and breathed a sigh of relief. He'd been prepared to wait for days if need be, but if he was going to send a message to Herrick, he preferred to do it quickly.

He took a deep breath, more out of habit than out of practicality, and stepped out of the shadows. The tall brunette draped around Cabot's shoulders saw him first. "What you doing here?" she asked in a shrill Bristolian accent.

Cabot looked up from the brunette's cleavage and saw Mitchell. "What the bloody hell do you want?" he asked irritably.

"Let her go." Mitchell said.

The vampire scowled. "Want her for herself, do you? Thought you'd given up all that." He released the girl grumpily. The brunette scowled at Mitchell.

Mitchell snarled. "Run," he told her. The girl took to her heels. A seconds later she took her heels off altogether and set off at a dead run for the town centre.

Cabot watched the girl go with gloomy resignation. Pariah though he was, Mitchell still ranked higher in the vampire hierarchy than Cabot did. "So if you're not here for the girl, what are you here for?"

Mitchell dug his hands into his coat pockets. "I want you to tell them something. From me."

"Why?" Cabot spat something dark and red and wet into the gloomy water. "Tell 'em yourself."

Mitchell drew closer. "I need an example."

"A what?"

Mitchell sighed. "Look," he said. "I want them to know that they don't mess with me and mine. If I want them, I'll find them. Otherwise, leave me the fuck alone."

"I get it." Cabot nodded, comprehension dawning. "But what I don't get is why you're telling me?"

"Because you're a message."Mitchell told him. His boots echoed on the wooden planks of the dock as he walked closer.

"Messenger." Cabot corrected. "You mean I'm a messenger? Why me?"

"You were there," Mitchell drawled with just a hint of viciousness in his voice; a trace of the old Mitchell. "You were the first one I found. I just thought you should know why you're dying."

"Dy-" Cabot said, then "Shit." The obscenity was truncated by a gurgle as Mitchell stepped closer and tore open the younger vampire's throat with his teeth. He bit deep enough that his canines grated against bone; a freedom he rarely indulged in these days because a tiny wound was much easier to hide from the medics. Vampire blood filled Mitchell's mouth. It was incredibly satisfying. If the blood was a drug it was a different sort of blood to human blood, but Mitchell liked it well enough. He drank deeply, unleashing all his anger and frustration on the unfortunate Cabot. When he'd had enough he took a sharp knife from his pocket, slid it into the wound and finished what he'd started. Cabot's head plopped into the water a second before his body followed; mouth open in a last silent scream.

Mitchell watched him float away and wondered how long it would take the vampires to find the body.

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face clean. When all scent of Cabot's blood had been removed he dropped the cloth into the water and watched it sink.

As the sodden rag floated out of sight Mitchell had a nasty feeling that his message, meant as a demonstration just how far from the vampires Mitchell was, had just brought him closer. Herrick would return. Mitchell would find it harder to refuse. Eventually, Josie would die.

Mitchell groaned as he slipped away into the dawn. He'd bought them both some time. That was all.

Behind him, Cabot's body rocked gently in the current.

Author's note:

This one's less depressing, but also, maybe, not as good. Regardless. The actress who plays Josie would have been fourteen in 1969, but the series explicitly states that they dated in the sixties, so I had to fudge things a bit. Mitchell was so a mod, hence the Small Faces refs, and the Ballad of John and Yoko really did top the charts in the summer of '69. It wasn't a hot summer though; the heat is a leftover from the heat wave of 1976, where this story did take place until I went back to watch the series and realized that Mitchell makes numerous references to them dating in the sixties. Oh well.


End file.
